Flock cameras are popping up in national forests and rangers are furious, 404 Media reported Tuesday.
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Flock Safety paints itself as nothing more than automated license-plate reader cameras that capture plates and other identifying vehicle details, such as the color, make, model, and any other visible features.
Many civil rights advocates fear that the camera footage could be used to aid in immigration arrests, target protesters or even search women seeking reproductive healthcare.
Further, there’s no warrant required to access the information from Flock cameras. Any officer anywhere could look through the footage, meaning a Texas cop could search for people parking in a Colorado Planned Parenthood parking lot for Texas tags.
What rangers are most concerned about is Flock’s tendency to deliver false positives. If a license plate is read incorrectly or a “hot list” is wrong, an innocent driver can be flagged or stopped. Automated systems can amplify the stakes of inaccurate data.
One park ranger confessed, “I fear for the day when a visitor’s National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate.”
They revealed that last year, “Yosemite changed the rules about hanging flags on El Capitan and tried to backdate the rule change to make it look like the people involved had committed a crime. What happens when that sort of malfeasance is combined with the ability to track any park visitor’s location, anywhere in the country? If that happens, we are no longer free in this country.”
One current NPS ranger told 404 Media, “Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem — but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy.”
“I just think that every American should be free to visit our national parks without their location being traced and tracked by the federal government. Wild places are at the core of American freedom and nobody should be afraid to visit them,” another current NPS ranger said.
One ex-NPS ranger told 404, “I think if the public knew that their public lands were being surveilled, they would push back.”
Yosemite National Park got Flock cameras, WBTW News 13 reported in early August. The cameras were identified by an open source map website called DeFlock.
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Unlike with other companies, officers have been caught using Flock’s camera systems to track ex-partners or colleagues, the Washington Post reported earlier this month. An affidavit revealed that one Florida police officer was accused of using Flock cameras to track his estranged wife’s vehicle 717 times, WSB-TV reported.
“If for some reason someone is looking for your car through an E-ZPass system, police have to submit a warrant to access the data. It’s not the same with Flock. There is no warrant required,” Lynchburg, Virginia Councilman Chris Faraldi told local media.
Reason posted a video from a police bodycam showing an officer confronting a woman and insisting that she was spotted by a Colorado Flock camera around the time a package was stolen. He wouldn’t provide any proof unless she agreed, she committed the crime.
“It is her, it is 100 percent, it is locked in, there is zero doubt,” the cop can be heard telling her.
The case was dropped after she was able to use cell phone location data to prove that she was somewhere else at the time the package was stolen.
The National Parks Service told 404 in a statement that the park doesn’t connect to the DMV database or any other law enforcement.
“Yosemite National Park uses a traffic-monitoring system to measure vehicle counts, travel times and entrance-station wait times. The system helps the park better understand traffic conditions and provide visitors with information to help them make informed decisions about when to visit and where parking is available,” the statement continued.
Garrett Langley, Flock Safety’s CEO remarked in an interview earlier this month that what he’s discovered in the backlash is that it isn’t the cameras people don’t trust; it’s the police.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two years talking to individuals, and a lot of them have said, ‘Well, I don’t trust the police,’ and I go, ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, well, the police have abused their power so many times,’” Langley said in an interview. “What’s changed for me is realizing that we have a responsibility, maybe an obligation even, to the communities we serve to set the standard.”
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